[Katharine @replies]

@purofilion Don’t forget the tangerine! (wrapped in foil, of course).

Right! I shall make a start on The West Wing this week, and keep you posted. @blenkinsopthebrave has Deadwood exactly right, I think – that’s certainly how David Milch is on record as having conceived it, too. I’d add that the violence is rarely just for the sake of entertainment – it genuinely shocks; though it can have comedy value, and there are a few characters who are so far beyond redemption that it’s a relief if (not always when) they get what’s coming to them, while the sex tends to be imperfect and messy and sometimes loathsome. The series also has, quite casually, equal opportunities nudity – from an aesthetic point of view not always pleasingly, but as far as I’m concerned a damn sight better than the usual naked women/covered men scenario.

You have seen The Wire, I take it?

I’ve also taken to e-books, as I live in a very small cottage with too many possessions, and couldn’t get into bed without falling over piles of novels (now shoved in a cupboard or gone to Oxfam), and the stairs were being used as bookshelves (not quite solved yet…); so while I buy hard copies of books I really want to keep, or for work purposes, my bedtime reading – deteective stories etc – is now downloaded to iBooks or the Kindle app. The trouble is, it’s so easy to do, that I think I’ve spent more on them than I would have done otherwise.

[Katharine @replies]

Nice pub!

@purofilion @craig et al

Thanks for the West Wing recommendation. I’ve just caught up with season 5 of Justified on Sky (apologies for giving money to Murdoch, but it’s the only way I can watch any cricket), so – as they have all of the West Wing as one of their box sets, that shall be my next venture. My son – whose judgement is sound – always loved it, but I rather felt I’d missed the boat on it.

Deadwood, as far as I’m concerned, is one of the greatest of the great HBO series, sadly cut off before the fourth and final season, so it just stopped. You need a high tolerance level for violence and explicit sex, as well as a level of profanity that makes The Thick of It sound like ‘Mary had a little lamb’. It’s about the development of Deadwood in the 1870s from rough camp to town, mixing historical and fictional characters, and drawing on the diaries and newspapers of the period. It’s brilliantly written, unafraid to mix long literary soliloquies with brutal crudity; and the cast is amazingly good – the more amazing to an English audience who only knew Ian McShane as the twinkly-eyed mulleted Lovejoy, slightly dodgy antique dealer in a comedy on late 1980s-early 1990s TV, and had to get used to him in a bravura performance as Al Swearingen, the bar owner. It’s not always comfortable watching, but it’s always gripping. (I must watch it again.)

[Katharine @replies]

@jimthefish Agreed, very careful about spoilers. As far as Angel goes, I suppose I feel cheated of the season already planned by JW, because he had to wrap it all up without much warning; but he did do it pretty well. I have very mixed feelings about the end of Buffy – it didn’t help that teasers about the upcoming season of Angel spoiled a major plot point, diminishing its emotional punch; and if I will never forgive David Milch for abandoning Deadwood in favour of John from Cincinnati, I was also not thrilled by JW taking his eye off Buffy because he had a new toy to play with in Firefly. I did look at the online comics, but I don’t really get on with them as a form and found I didn’t care about what happened in them.

[Katharine @replies]

@purofilion – ER at its peak was genuinely terrific TV, though, as you say, went on too long; but at least they managed to finish it in some style. Some of my favourite series have had real trouble with satisfactory endings (I’m thinking especially of BSG, having never had the same emotional attachment to Lost), while one of the best of all, Deadwood, was cut off without an ending of any kind (see also Angel and Firefly). I still enjoy reruns of Poirot, but never got into West Wing – too late now?

I echo others – if you’ve only seen episodes 1 and 2 of season 1 of Buffy, what an amazing treat you have coming. The first season is immensely entertaining, but it takes a step up in season 2. Quiet menace? Sounds like Angel to me…

[Katharine @replies]

A group watch of Buffy sounds fun! I never feel confident enough about my Who knowledge to contribute to discussions here, though I lurk a lot, but I’m an old Buffy fan (in both senses of ‘old’, regrettably), which I watched from series 1 with my teenage children (now in their thirties!). Buffy could make you laugh like a drain, terrify you (sometimes both at the same time – ‘Hush’, anyone?), and explored human emotions honestly and deeply (The Body). It’s a good while since I rewatched, but I do remember that RTD quite deliberately used Buffy as a model for Nu-Who. Mind you, the rancorousness BTL on the Grauniad’s Who blogs is as nothing compared to the old Buffy flame wars…

And yes, Anthony Head only gets better and better as Giles; one of my favourite characters.

[Katharine @replies]

This is, I’m sure, my first tentative attempt at a small theory (I’ve otherwise restricted myself to what I actually know about, which is early modern drama!), but I was struck by the way Clara says ‘I love you…These words from me are your words now’. It’s a lovely way of putting it, but it’s also quite odd – as if she were passing him a code to remember, perhaps? – providing another reason for his refusal to say anything else on the phone to her from the Nethersphere. Maybe, as others have speculated, there really is some kind of time loop, or shift in time, here.

[Katharine @replies]

I’ve lurked here for a long time (so much pleasanter than the Guardian BTL!), but never till now felt impelled to sign up and join in, as I’m not so knowledgeable about Doctor Who as to be able to contribute to all the theorising, despite my first Doctor being Patrick Troughton (I gave up after Peter Davison and didn’t start watching again till Eccleston). However, I do know about early modern drama (I teach it) – my one contribution to the Guardian blog was to identify the quotation from Antony and Cleopatra in ‘The Crimson Horror’ – so the not very accurate (sorry!) references to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus have brought me out of hiding. (General warning: Wikipedia is very poor on early modern literature.)

There is no equivalent to Gretchen in Marlowe’s play – the only female character of any significance is the spirit Helen of Troy, who never speaks but contributes to Faustus’s damnation when, it is implied, he has sex with her. The two different versions of the play don’t suggest that Marlowe changed his mind about Faustus being damned – he is taken to hell  by Lucifer in both versions (his final hallucinatory soliloquy pleading in vain for one drop of Christ’s blood to redeem him is one of the most glorious speeches in all of English drama), but one version has him more literal-mindedly – and theatrically – being torn to pieces by devils.

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